It did not beat him that night; for he stayed in the apartment until dawn broke. But from midnight on, he lay with every light in the place going. At sunrise, he dressed and went out for a walk. And the moment the sounds of everyday life began to humanize the neighborhood, he returned; sat down to his machine.
“Spink, old dear, my mind is made up. I accept! I’ll do Lutetia for you; and, by God, I’ll do her well! I’m starting for Boston tomorrow night on the midnight. I’ll call at the office about noon and we’ll go to luncheon together. I’ll dig out my thesis and books from storage, and if you’ll get all your dope and data together, I can go right to it. I’m going to Quinanog tomorrow afternoon. I need a change. Everybody here makes me tired. The pacifists make me wild and the militarists make me wilder. Civilians is nuts when it comes to a war. The only person I can talk about it with is somebody who’s been there. And anybody who’s been there has the good sense not to want to talk about it. I don’t ever want to hear of that war again. Personally, I, David Lindsay, meaning me, want to swing in a hammock on a pleasant, cool, vine-hung piazza; read Lutetia at intervals and write some little pieces subsequent. Yours, David.”
II
Susannah Ayer dragged herself out of her sleepless night and started to get up. But halfway through her first rising motion, something seemed to leave her—to leave her spirit rather than her body. She collapsed in a droop-shouldered huddle onto the bed. Her red hair had come out of its thick braids; it streamed forward over her white face; streaked her nightgown with glowing strands. She pushed it out of her eyes and sat for a long interval with her face in her hands. Finally she rose and went to the dresser. Haggardly she stared into the glass at her reflection, and haggardly her reflection stared back at her. “I don’t wonder you look different, Glorious Susie,” she addressed herself wordlessly, “because you are different. I wonder if you can ever wash away that experience—”
She poured water into the basin until it almost brimmed; and dropped her face into it. After her sponge bath, she contemplated herself again in the glass. Some color had crept into the pearly whiteness of her cheek. Her dark-fringed eyes seemed a little less shadow-encircled. She turned their turquoise glance to the picture of a woman—a miniature painted on ivory—which hung beside the dresser.
“Glorious Lutie,” she apostrophized it, “you don’t know how I wish you were here. You don’t know how much I need you now. I need you so much, Glorious Lutie—I’m frightened!”
The miniature, after the impersonal manner of pictures, made no response to this call for help. Susannah sighed deeply. And for a moment she stood a figure almost tragic, her eyes darkening as she looked into space, her young mouth setting its soft scarlet into hard lines. In another moment she pulled herself out of this daze and continued her dressing.
An hour and a half later, when, cool and lithe in her blue linen suit, she entered the uptown skyscraper which housed the Carbonado Mining Company, her spirits took a sudden leap. After all, here was help. It was not the help she most desired and needed—the confidence and advice of another woman—but at least she would get instant sympathy, ultimate understanding.
Anyone, however depressed his mood, must have felt his spirits rise as he stepped into the Admolian Building. It was so new that its terra-cotta walls without, its white-enameled tiling within, seemed always to have been freshly scrubbed and dusted. It was so high that, with a first acrobatic impulse, it leaped twenty stories above ground; and with a second, soared into a tower which touched the clouds. That had not exhausted its strength. It dug in below ground, and there spread out into rooms, eternally electric-lighted. From the eleventh story up, its wide windows surveyed every purlieu of Manhattan. Its spacious elevators seemed magically to defy gravitation. A touch started their swift flight heavenward; a touch started their soft drop earthward. Every floor housed offices where fortunes were being made—and lost—at any rate, changing hands. There was an element of buoyancy in the air, an atmosphere of success. People moved more quickly, talked more briskly, from the moment they entered the Admolian Building. As always, it raised the spirits of Susannah Ayer. The set look vanished from her eyes; some of their normal brilliancy flowed back into them. Her mouth relaxed— When the elevator came to a padded halt at the eighteenth floor, she had become almost herself again.